Figurative and Descriptive Language : Figurative and Descriptive Language What’s the difference? Isn’t description just description?
Straight Description : Straight Description gives the reader (or listener) a concrete idea
makes heavy use of nouns and adjectives
leaves the reader or listener with a clear, distinct picture
how we describe depends on the rhetorical purpose
Straight Description : Straight Description The house that stood on the swell of a low hill was built in the late 1700s. Its age was easy to guess, even if one didn't know for sure when it was built; it had the look of a very old and long-lived-in place. The stone foundation rose about a foot above the frozen ground, supporting the first of the long, peeling white clapboards that ran the length of the house, broken only by the two imperfectly rectangular windows on the first floor, which were paned in wavy glass that distorted the view of the fields beyond. The front door was wooden, hinged and hasped with ancient iron and painted a somber shade of red to hide the rust stains that streaked down the length of the door to leave splotches of brown-red on the stone steps beneath. Climbing up the eastern exposure of the house was an ivy vine which was almost as old as the house itself, and that, when rimed in frost on a morning such as this, shimmered in the early morning sun. As she looked on this, her ancestral home, she felt a curious combination of welcome and inevitability.
Figurative Language : Figurative Language Figurative language IS descriptive language
Figurative language makes use of literary or rhetorical devices
leaves the reader or listener with both a mental picture and an emotional or sensory response
Figurative Language : Figurative Language The old house stood against the cold, all squat and hunched on its stone belly. Looking out on their third century of sunrises were the eye-like windows, the wavy glass reminiscent of an old man who has to squint through spectacles that don't quite correct his vision. The whole house gave the impression of an old man; the thin breath issuing from the stone chimney, misaligned from years of frost heaves and summer storms, was feeble against the blowing December wind, the fireplace and the ancient furnace never quite enough to chase the cold from the square, low-ceilinged rooms. The floorboards creaked underfoot like old bones, following the inhabitants through the house like an insistent child. The too-old pipes rattled with protest whenever called upon to deliver water from the well in the dooryard. For all of the ravages of age, though - the warping floors, the door that never closed right, the groan and creak of the house trying to settle itself in the cold - this was where she belonged, and though she dreaded the work that would have to be done before she could move in, she knew there was no other place on the face of the planet where she would feel more at home.
What’s the Difference? : What’s the Difference? Notice that, even though the writer had the same physical place - the house - in mind, the feel of the passage that uses figurative language is very different from the the one that focuses on straight description. We still get a picture of the house, but the ways we're being asked to think about it are different.
Types of Figurative Language : Types of Figurative Language There are a number of different rhetorical devices we use to convey meaning, description, and feeling
The tools we use depend on the kind of idea we want to convey
Imagery : Imagery Imagery is language that engages the senses - sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing
“Mother’s voice,she used her water-bright soprano in the Baptist choir, did not sing, yet sang back replies” (p. 37)
Simile : Simile a simile is a comparison of two unlike things using "like," "as," or "than."
“The sun rose yellow as a lemon”(p. 60)
Metaphor : Metaphor a metaphor compares two unlike things directly, often (but not always) using a form of the verb "to be."
“And Will? Why, he’s the last peach, high on a summer tree” (p. 18)
“The white snowflake moths tapped at the window” (p. 44)
Alliteration : Alliteration alliteration is a device that uses the repetition of sound to create a mood or a feeling
“It had been there ever since Will remembered, since civilization unthinkingly poured forth the dull hard unresisting cement sidewalks” (p. 92)
Personification : Personification personification is attributing human qualities to non-human things.
“(The train)...asked permission but to lie dead in autumn strewings, so much tired steam and iron gunpowder blowing away” (p.61)
Onomatopoeia : Onomatopoeia onomatopoeia (on-uh-mah-toe-PEE-uh) is language that is intended to convey or evoke a specific sound.
Bang! they were gone! (p. 20)
Mr. Cooger, somewhere behind the eye slits, went blink-click with his insect-Kodak pupils. (p. 86)
Hyperbole : Hyperbole hyperbole (high-PER-boll-ee) is the use of exaggeration for effect
Will saw that paper frolicked in the trees, its words The MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, and fever prickled his cheeks. (p.37)